John Ruskin was a lifelong traveller, and his tours on the Continent extended from 1825, when he was six, to 1888, when he was nearly seventy.  Almost always, he and his parents, without whom he did not travel until he was twenty-six, followed ‘The Old Road,’ from Calais to the Alps and northern Italy.  Led by English picturesque painters in pursuit of aesthetic, historical and cultural associations, Ruskin was possessed by the great monuments of European architecture and the characterizing artworks of a Christian civilization he saw was under threat in an age when even tourism itself was becoming industrialized.  Ultimately, his underlying quest became the imaginative recovery of the cultural communities of Swiss towns and the Middle Ages in northern France and the Italian City States.

The present exhibition maps out his principal routes and displays key images which represent his cultural destinations: chiefly in Switzerland, Savoy, northern France and Italy, and focusing on Chamonix, Venice and Amiens .  His own drawings and some of the journals and notebooks which recorded his assiduous researches illustrate his aims, methods and techniques, together with the guidebooks and Traveller’s Editions of his own writings which he prepared for the Victorian Cultural Tourist.  There are also watercolours by J.M.W. Turner and his contemporaries, including loans from the Whitworth Art Gallery (University of Manchester) and Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust (Guild of St. George collection).  The exhibition forms part of Lancaster University’s Ruskin Centre project John Ruskin, Cultural Travel and Popular Access, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Images on this page: top row - Thomas Matthews Rooke: Rue Damiette, Rouen; John Ruskin: Lausanne; middle row - Claude Vernet: Les voyageurs Anglais [private collection]; bottom row - John Ruskin: State of Snow on Mont Blanc; John Ruskin: Ponte dei Pugni; Arthur Severn: Amiens Cathedral

Catalogues are available for many of our exhibitions - see our Publications List for details.

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